More Battles
by jaykaythree
Summary: The Last Battle was not the last, or anywhere close.
1. Strike the Iron

Since I'm not Mr Lewis or his estate, I own none of his characters or books. On the other hand, I did come up with Pinchblossom and Leafwimple. 

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My dear daughter Pinchblossom,

In response to your most recent letter, I share your sadness over so many losses to the Enemy in a single day. Most to the point, as you are too painfully aware, we lost almost the entire family of your subject, especially her brothers and younger sister. For the loss of her sister, it will go particularly hard with Leafwimple -- I shall see to that personally.

To lose almost a whole family, however, is not necessarily to lose it completely. This is where you come in. Your woman, Hell be praised, would have been safely delivered to us had she been on that train. This, of course, comes of her desire to be more than she is, to be older and to suppose herself wiser. She does this by remembering herself to have been a Queen, in a land ruled by the Enemy. Oh, my child. Amid the horrors of the Enemy's kingship, and of his victory in that world over Our Father Below -- or more accurately, Our Mother, according to her name there -- your woman and her sister were things of rare beauty. Princes of all stripes sought their hands in marriage, and minstrels made delicious fools of themselves to sing of her. And do you know? She lapped it up like the intoxicant it was, and so much the better to turn her focus toward herself and away from the Enemy.

Then came the day when the Enemy tipped his hand by telling your woman that she had become too old to remain in that place. "Tipped His hand," I say, because she was yet showing signs to lose sight of Him; for Him to send her into her own world, was the beginning of the closing of the deal, if you will. Her sole sustenance has been the memory of her time as a Queen, to her riches there, and to your most ignoble effort to capitalise on her still-bewitching looks.

These things are the most she has now -- work to keep her mind on those. She will also from time to time, grieve for her family. I cannot stress enough how important it is to keep the blame for that railway accident on the Enemy. It is true, Our Father Below struck that train, caused the "honest mistake" of the engineer to, as they say in the world above, "zig when he should have zagged." But it is beyond perilous to permit your woman to see that. Do not let up from telling her that the Enemy could have stopped it, could have kept her family off the train, and so it goes. Let up, and the Enemy may well prove true to form and make a mile of that inch.

Can you not hear the iron screaming to be stricken in its heat?

Your affectionate mother,  
Slumtrimpet


	2. Clawing Back

My dear daughter Pinchblossom, 

It is once again, according to the calendar in your woman's world, what is called a weekend. Such times, as you know, are most favorable for exploiting your woman's weaknesses -- which, fortunately for you, she lays bare at such opportunities as these.

One of these weaknesses is her recently acquired fondness for alcoholic drink. When your woman dwelt in the Enemy's kingdom, she came into contact with some of what was undeniably the finest wine that ever existed. Of course, with the Enemy so close by, she flattered herself that she did not hear when you told her how smoothly it flowed over her tongue, and the delicateness of the taste and the smell. Of course, she had not this railway accident to grate so upon her heart, nor what the Enemy called "being too old to remain in that place." As she would do anything to take the memory of such things from her mind, her going out to get inebriated, at what she calls "parties," is most helpful. This is especially true when your woman has drunk enough of her own world's drink that she cannot see -- praise to Our Father Below for it -- that it was none but the Enemy Himself who infused her heart with the desire to return to Him and to His country. Never mind that he said she was too old to return there -- you have her clawing to get back, in your own sweetly debased way.

There is also the small matter of something whose origin always pains me to remember, coming as it does from the Enemy. Even so, we have always prided ourselves -- and rightly too, I must say -- to mold it into our image. I am speaking, of course, of that which is called Sex. Only after the Enemy sent her away from that awful place did your woman get a taste for such pleasures as the Enemy could design, and your devoted efforts helped to cultivate it. It nauseates me to know that Our Father Below cannot take the credit for such things as the feel of skin upon skin, the way a good stout kiss can make those getting and receiving it feel as though they are flying, and the waves of purest bliss that can only come from the release found in the physical union between a man and a woman. Your own woman recently discovered these pleasures on her own, shortly before losing her family; now that they are dead, she finds that what passes for solace in the great rush of emotion and adrenalin that sex can provide.

Amid all the drunken trollop you have so wonderfully made of her, your success is not complete. After all, she has not completely forgotten that she was, in fact, a Queen. At this point I must ignore the rising of my gorge and tell you the name of that place, if you do not know it. If you do know it, buck up and stand as strong as you can.

Narnia. That is the name of that wretched dump. The place of which the Enemy said, "Once a King or Queen, always a King or Queen." This is not to say that he was lying, but the complete phrase was, "Once a King or Queen in Narnia, always a King or Queen in Narnia." Your woman must never be allowed to forget that she is no longer in Narnia. Therefore, she is -- for the moment, anyway -- no longer a Queen.

However large a hammer you may need, let me know. I will be beyond glad and privileged to supply you with the required instrument for pounding that through her head. Please write soon to inform me of the successes I so eagerly anticipate.

Your affectionate mother,  
Slumtrimpet


	3. A Near Thing

The prayer Screwtape recites, and its meaning, are, like anything else of Mr Lewis's, his estate's and not mine. Waterstrange is, though.

My dear daughter Pinchblossom,

I agree that it was a near thing for your woman recently, especially since her frequenting of those parties could have come in handy for her. There, as you know, she has befriended someone who specialises in, as they so commonly put it, "taking care of little problems." She is indeed one of our ignoblest Shadies, with her soul all but fed to us with spoons. Not only do we delight in her shattering one of the Enemy's Commandments the way she does, but she also puts such young women as seek her out into wondrously close range. She will make us a fine lunch one day -- but no one, especially not she, can make us a free one.

While it is true that your woman's "friend" has well-nigh delivered herself to us, she cannot exactly deaden all souls who cross her path. For those, the Enemy's breath falls on those troublesome little coals called Conscience. One hefty gust of His wind, and some of those women begin to feel that horrid Remorse over it; once they get there, the Enemy can gain a foothold in doing something none of us here in Hell can fathom. He looks to restore those wretched creatures into a relationship with Him. For some of them, none of us can scream the truth so loudly that He or they pay us any heed. They are back in His camp faster than we can tell it.

The children of those human creatures -- indeed, all human children in general -- are things Our Father Below has taught us all very well to loathe and to despise. Nothing gives us a quick burst of pleasure in quite the same way as to see a successful strike against one of their lives. In too many cases, however, our pleasure expires to know that they shall one day be carried straightaway into the presence of the Enemy. This is even truer of those whose lives your woman's friend, and others like her, crush out as they do.

After this point, I shall close the topic. This point is really little more than sugar-frosting atop a cake: of very little consequence, but plenty sweet in its own right. Your woman's friend, by serving us with such craven conduct, is also in violation of criminal statutes in the city and country of her world. Our Father Below, though, has shown me that within twenty-five of the World of Men's years, we shall lose that sweetness when those laws in your woman's country will be cast down, but many more shall set their paths toward us that way. We stand to lose quite a number of small souls, but what we lose among them, we shall gain in larger souls who permit its happening.

At any rate, I am sure that it served your woman as a relief to find her body in proper working order, delayed three days that she was in getting there.

Now. Let us be about the business you told me was urgent -- and so it is. The rail crash wherein your woman lost her family, also claimed the life of someone else we lost to the Enemy -- an old professor in a far-off part of the same country. Before we lost him, he went before a solicitor and drew a Testament. In it, he made a provision for your woman. What exactly that provision is, I will not know until I see it with you.

There is a reason your woman belongs to you -- you, who graduated with the lowest Dishonors the Tempters' College has seen in many ages. Certainly you remember that banquet where Mr Screwtape recited a prayer directed at the Enemy -- "O God, make me a normal twentieth century girl!" -- and decoded its true meaning, on which only Our Father Below could properly deliver: "Make me a minx, a moron, and a parasite." Never let it leave your mind that it was your woman who said that. Seal her mouth if need be, but let her body reflect that true meaning. Cause her eyes to dart here and there while the will is read. Clench her fingers so that only we may see them grasping. At the mention of money, should there be any, make her uneasy in her chair, and cause a smile to play on her face.

This last, I cannot stress enough. Even if you have to move Hell and Earth to do it, you must see that your woman gets no contact whatever with the solicitor's wife. Let her make eyes at the solicitor, put a little more bounce to her walk, but that man's wife is wholly to be off-limits to her. If you are unfortunate enough to do so in her stead -- and I was, when in the first part of that marriage, I was unsuccessful in helping Waterstrange pick out young men to turn that wife's head -- you will find that since she was a small child, she has radiated the Enemy, drawing strength from Him and from His love for her. Waterstrange, as you know, is still being served up for our having lost the solicitor's mother-in-law to Him. Permit me to be confident that you will not come to a similar end as Waterstrange.

Now do as this letter is doing -- be about your way. Good luck, and Our-Father-Below-speed.

Your affectionate mother,  
Slumtrimpet 


	4. Answers Landing

My dear daughter Pinchblossom,

As we both have become too well aware since we wrote each other last, there is nothing to be gained in increasing one's efforts if the results were greatly diminished as they were. So it was when your woman went to hear that old dodderer's will read.

Most of what money had been his, had immediately gone to settle the solicitor's fee, and what remained of it went to a charitable trust and to some of the servants he had had when he was able to afford them. In that, you and your woman took that first blow right away. In order to recoup that loss, you wasted no time in urging your woman on to try some of that silent feminine charm that has so long been hers. That solicitor, however, would have none of it. He had only to catch sight of your instruction -- your woman would fidget with the hem of her skirt, or when she heard the will read, would lean over and in, leading with her breasts -- to do nothing more than offer his eyes a quarter-roll, and that was it. Your woman was not able to have held his interest for all her world, or we, could offer. Of course, the fault lies mostly with you, in allowing yourself to send even such a teasing coquette as your woman up against someone as entrenched in the Enemy and His teachings as that solicitor is. I will do it later instead of now, but you may be sure I will take you in hand over that.

The worst blow against our influence came at the last -- the provision that old Professor had made for your woman and, had they lived, her siblings. Nothing was there for her but so many old books. Your influence and tutelage had, since she left the Enemy's kingship, much diminished her love of those books. Atop it all -- Our Father Below be praised -- this is truer of no book than of the Enemy's Book. When your woman found that she had been left a copy, how my heart thrilled to see her regard it with a sideways glance and a thanking so short as to reveal how dismissive it was, and how well, in this instance, that said Book has been clay beneath our hands -- but that first thrilling of my heart lasted as long as your woman's glance.

Your woman was to return to her city on a train next morning, and would take her rest over the preceding evening. During that day, she would find lodging in that town's great squalor known as the solicitor's house. Never mind how cleanly the place is kept. Anywhere that so swims in the presence of the Enemy, with those things called Love, and Peace, and Joy, can only be counted as a disgusting little Heaven-hole. That aside, you helped keep the conversation inconsequential for most of the day, and on nothing of any import -- until dinnertime, that is. It was little wonder that you, as you have since written me, fell into confusion.

In your youth, you have not yet come to hone the knowledge I have earned of predicting future events based on information available to you. It was for that reason that I so strongly cautioned you against bringing your woman near the solicitor's wife; I could see in that wife, the potential for working the Enemy's purpose out. When the evening meal was served, the wife had the very cheek to volunteer asking the Enemy's Blessing on them and on their meal. And what did your woman do? She played the good sport -- she may not have believed so much of it, but she went right along and bowed her head. Even to play that way is a danger to us, but since you paid me no heed at the onset, neither you nor I could go after either of them. And it only became worse as the evening drew to its close.

There exist, in the World of Men, marks in time to tell men when they may take their rests. Those marks are called Nights. When that Night came, your woman made her preparations to return to her own city, and to lie down for a rest. I know it looked appealing to you to do so, but as you are not a human creature, you have no need to take rests. More to the point, it is especially in these Nights that our voices are the loudest to those in our charge. Yours usually is, which keeps your woman in that most deliciously accursed state of Despair over what you have helped her to become. That night, though, you had tired yourself from your disregard to what I had told you -- and worse will follow, for both of us.

Your woman started thinking about how, when she had been a child, her mother had taught her things about the Enemy, and how He showed that reprehensible Love to her. Your voice wore its usual strength when you reminded her of the truth of the times in which she now lives -- how she too much loves drink, loves sharing her bedchamber with those dashing young men on whom we have hold. And did you see? You had her lying in bed, in glorious and many tears over the knowledge that the Enemy is all Purity, all Holiness, all everything against which we fight -- and since she has let you make her into someone who lives against them, you have been able to tell her that since she does the things the Enemy hates, she is also just such a thing. She is fit for nothing but His hatred and the anger in His -- must I say the word? -- righteousness.

One thing I love to see in human children, is that delightful thing called being Lost. When they are, their cries, mostly from feeling that their parents have abandoned them or else no longer care, are our great treasures, and I know you agree. Great screams give way to crushed little sobs, such as your woman offered up. At that moment, I knew I had better prepare as best I could -- for all the good it would or would not do.

Your woman asked the Enemy -- not in the mocking tone with which she usually mentions or addresses Him, but in a thin, broken voice of a little girl missing in a crowd -- where He could be found after these blows we have stricken her. Worse still, she followed with wondering if your truth was no longer strong enough -- whether He could still love her after she has so transgressed Him.

It was the same answer that fell. On her ear and heart, it was thin as a whisper, but on us -- not on our ears, but on us -- it was as a rock falling from a great height.

One of the ways the Enemy's Book depicts Our Father Below is as, and I must quote here, "a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour." Had you been better about your work those few days, your woman might have been more favorably positioned to be devoured that way. But on the subject of lions, only the Enemy is depicted as The Lion -- not just any lion, but The Lion -- who came to triumph. The Enemy had such a triumph in His mind when he answered that human creature as he did, and when it sounded to us as it did. In our ears, the answer was just such a roar.

For the moment, He contented Himself with saying, "Yes." Your woman may not have heard it very well at first, but she fell asleep asking Him to love her if He was still available. Had you kept up your watch, she could not have heard or asked.

Your power is slipping, daughter of mine. Now that my hearing has returned, call out to me and seek my help. You will need it, with your woman's establishing even so small a hold for the Enemy.

Your affectionate but most displeased mother,  
Slumtrimpet 


	5. At Her Convenience

My dear daughter Pinchblossom,

I still seek an explanation concerning why you did not have your woman on that train, or waiting on that railway platform, with the rest of her family. If she had been, she would have died with them, but here is the difference -- unlike them, she would have been ours irrevocably. As it stands at the moment, the balance tips our way, but the chance of that is decreasing daily. In that, let me commend your wisdom for not striking at the return to her city, nor at her life. While we may yet lay our rightful claim, it would be far better for us to have the guarantee of same. Besides, it has only been since her departure from the solicitor's house that we have had sights enough in which to catch her.

Daughter of Eve. The Enemy gave her that name as a tribute, a prelude to her Queenship. On that night at the solicitor's, however, you had to remind her that it was Eve who first stepped out far enough to distrust the Enemy, thus setting into motion the chain by which her deceiver -- Our Father Below -- could come to take power over the World of Men. Hers was, if you please, that world's Original Sin. And is your woman not her Mother's Daughter, living as she is in frivolity and in the spoiling of her soul?

Usually, you tell her this truth in the softness that her mind calls Reason, after the parties have ended and she has slept off the night to find her head sore as she recovers from her drunkenness. On that particular night, however, you had to shout it as though you were calling across a canyon. That was just such a distance as you had permitted the Enemy to fix between you and your woman. And who had the privilege of the gentle voice, the slender fingers drawing the hair off her forehead? That awful solicitor's wife, of course. She had passed by there in the night to drink a glass of water in her inability to sleep, and ended by doing nothing more than let your woman lay herself open for what she is -- and do take some heart, my daughter. Your woman told that wife the truth, how she lives and pretends to love. She is worth nothing of the Enemy save His contempt, and she said as much. Yet you do well to despair, as none of that fazed the wife. She ignored all that truth and folded her into something she has not known since she, and we, lost her family -- an embrace filled so full of Kindness as to repulse and to choke even the stoutest among us. And there was not the self-interest that shines out of those "friends" she calls -- the sadness of your woman's heart began to weigh on the wife's heart as well. The right hand was undoing the work of the left -- and continues to do.

When your woman met her train next day, Mr and Mrs Solicitor petitioned the Enemy for her safety, after which they extended something dangerous enough on its face, but far worse should it come to pass. They invited her to come out and pay a visit at her convenience. Ah, does there not spring up a fragment of hope at those last words? "At her convenience." Do you not see the inch the Enemy has allowed us? Our efforts must increase, to be sure, but continue to make her remember who she is and where you have her. Cause her to glance at the calendar, that she may not forget where she has been invited, and into whose company. Even more so, call to her mind how she thinks her urban friends are Sophisticated. That is to say, they are too far advanced for believing in the Enemy, or -- and this is our best yet -- in us. It must then follow that these she met in the far-off town, however much they come to be Well-Meaning People, are simpletons over their beliefs. This is a formula which has served us handsomely -- our tables as well as our objectives.

Another weekend is coming. After it has gone, please inform me how well you have driven all thoughts from her mind except as concern her life and its style. Prove to me, and indeed to all the watching Hell, that you were worthy to become so young a Temptress.

Your affectionate but irritatedly perturbed mother,  
Slumtrimpet 


	6. New and Everlasting Names

My dear daughter Pinchblossom,  
I was obviously not clear enough in my last instructions. While it was very well for you to go with your woman on her outing to the solicitor's town last week, it would have been better to have prevented her entirely. And please do not come to tell me that you almost caused her to forget, that you had her at two parties each of the previous weekends. We in Hell strive for direct hits on our marks, not close approaches. However much ground you fail to cover, the Enemy can begin to use to His advantage -- as we shall see from your reports to me.

Remember that this town was not only that of the solicitor, but of that Professor fool. It was here that your woman first encountered the Enemy on the terms you have helped her to repress. From that town, it became only a short walk -- past some winter coats, of all things -- to where the Enemy waited for that whole family, to show them what He means to do with all those human creatures. He wanted, as He still wants, to make kings and queens of them, and to call them by new and everlasting names. We cannot create such names, but we can mar and blur their images for as long as the creatures live in their world.

Your woman's name, as the Enemy gave it her, was Gentle. Her kindness to the beasts of her world and of the Enemy's is a kindness He wrote on her heart at her birth, so please do not waste your effort in trying to erase that. Rather, continue to turn it around, to invert it -- keep her more concerned for the mice in her walls than for any of those young human males of whose affection she has tired and toward whom she lacks the decency to tell except over the telephone. And no, we may not dwell on her siblings -- with names as repugnant as Valiant, and Just, and Magnificent, the Enemy can have them! Only be thankful to Our Father Below that their losses are neither of our responsibilities.

But back to the solicitor and his wife. While we would prefer to have people think hard about why they show kindness, if and when they do, it comes almost as naturally to this couple's hearts as the sun comes over the eastern hills. Theirs is a compassion not motivated by condescension, or greed, or any feeling of self-importance, such as your woman has seen in whatever churches she deigns to attend -- and her not doing so is another tally beside your name. They act as they do because the Enemy is saying to them, "Here is someone I love as I have loved you, and as I continue to do. Go and follow My example." Mark how willingly they act on that, and your woman's response. With neither she nor we having her family, she has decided to take to them, that she may feel Safe in the knowledge that there is again a human creature to whom she has come to matter for more than a weekend and that with which we fill it.

Make no mistake -- the Enemy has fixed these creatures with the desire for fullness of heart, and He alone can offer that in just the manner and volume required. All we can offer, through the agency of Our Father Below, are counterfeits -- but there are enough of them, and of creatures who will accept them, that we need not worry on the grand scale just yet. On souls themselves, though, we do well to take concern.

Now here is the worst of it -- the solicitor and his wife have children, one of each gender. There is a young man, much the same age as your woman's elder brother; his sister, the age of your woman's other brother. I wish it were not so, but it seems that I must explain why your woman should be kept from them: they are the type whose presence encourages Honesty. By this, I do not mean our brand of it, with lying awake and wallowing in despair over our showing them what they are. No, this is the way the Enemy meant it. It is the sort of desire to set all to rights, to care so deeply for their fellow creatures as not to do them harm by withholding the Truth. The daughter will seek to befriend your woman; worse still, the son already thinks himself led of the Enemy to care for her as no man has done, nor that she has permitted. He is not simply in love with her -- which, as you know, we have made into nothing beyond infatuation and an endocrine addiction. No. In even so short a time, both siblings love her already, have begun to care for her well-being in such a way as cannot help drawing her closer to the Enemy. But it is on the young man that we need to keep our eyes -- he may actually come to love her more deeply. The next step, as you know, is for them to be what the Enemy calls Married -- One Flesh with each other. In that, there is the danger of her abandoning her promiscuity -- oh, do not drop your guard, child! As to that young man, he is certainly keeping Threadpin's hands full. I must speak with Threadpin at once concerning your woman, that he may tell his man; it may come to naught, but we dare not slack our efforts now.

Most of the time, when your woman is in that building called a Church, she concerns herself with which of her friends she may meet, or how to dress in such a way as to attract whatever fellow can undo her dressing, or in picking apart the pastor's homily. But when your woman came into the family's Church that morning, she encountered that contagion known as the Peace that Passeth Understanding. Not just the solicitor's family, but so many others, were crawling with it, in their words and their actions. To that extent, your woman's eyes began to condense, as she started seeing how that blinding Love shows forth from the Enemy, through His people, and offers them even the slightest refuge against our marching apace across their world. Then came the words we have dreaded so long.

Your woman dropped her head before the Enemy, and showed us up for liars and incompetents. Try as we dare to block it, the Enemy will not relent from His love for those creatures -- she said as much. If that had not been enough, she then thanked Him for loving even such a disgusting thing as she is! What can come next but her taking a public stand for Him?

Please do not tax my maternal feelings any more than you are doing with your bungling. I want to feel for you as my daughter, not as my dinner.

Your fearful yet affectionate mother,  
Slumtrimpet 


	7. All Is Not Lost

My dear daughter Pinchblossom,

It is only from force of habit that I so address you today. Even the knowledge that this happens to our sharpest Tempters does not excuse such a brand of failure. For the moment, you may thank Our Father Below that all you have lost was your sight, and even then, not permanently.

Your woman has confessed Faith in the Enemy. Faith that He will look past the filth she is and turn her from our paths as He restores her spirit to a clean standing before Him. Mind as well that she can do nothing but ask. This changing of her heart and ways lies solely with Him, and with that perversion, that aberration, called Mercy -- but He does it! And that is the moment in which your sight failed you -- when she came up from confessing Him, then from being head-to-foot in that water, that was the Enemy's light on her face. If Our Father Below must run from that light, lest it catch him straight on, how much more are we so compelled lest -- well, I obviously need not remind you.

I must ask, though, that you save your blubbing until such time, Hell forfend, as you would lose her forever. Not only have you not so lost her, but even in such a blow as we are dealt, the Enemy gives us nothing that He also does not reserve for Himself.

The first such thing is Time. If all goes well, your woman may live another forty years, or fifty, or even past that. You are well aware of the power of a moment's suggestion; think of what you may accomplish if there are decades available to you. I am not, of course, recommending that you wait that long. We may have such time, or we may lose your woman within the coming week. Either way, you must begin to reassert yourself before her. Now is a wondrous chance for that -- since she is so freshly started in knowing Him, you may remind her often of the hold you possessed even so recently over her. Send some of her current friends -- especially her male ones -- round to call, perhaps with a bottle of a vintage she has treasured but vainly sought. If we wait until the point when she is close to, as one of her world's poets said, "shuffling off her mortal coil," or even halfway to when we think she may, I dare say it will be too late.

It is true in the World of Men, and equally so for us: if there is a set task to be completed in a fixed amount of Time, the task will so expand as to fill all that time. Working to recover a soul from the Enemy will require most, if not all, of a Tempter's time and laborious effort. Forgive me if I fail exactly to congratulate you for the hand you have dealt yourself.

After dealing with Time, we must address familial relationships. The success, or lack thereof, in extricating one who has so recently professed the Enemy has much to do with the patient's choice of company in general, and family in particular. As you are too sadly aware, the Solicitor's family have their feet solidly set on the Enemy and will look to Him to encourage and entice your woman in His path. More also, if you prove to be as careless in future as you were today, your woman will look to their example of trusting His goodness that way, and do so for herself. There are few sights as hateful to us as whole families entrenched in such trust -- He has them so far under His protection that we may only attempt to strike without assurance of landing the kind of good hard hit on which we thrive.

Finally, if I may extend on the family idea, there is an avenue which remains open to us -- even if only through an oversight on the part of Our Father Below. For all the libertine behaviour in which your woman engaged, the Enemy saw fit to protect her body. You know what that means. Even if it is some other young man she marries, although the Solicitor's son is a strong favorite in that, the Enemy will look to fine-tune her heart and conduct to draw exclusively unto her husband. And success shall often enough be His, that the human creatures shall not leave off after having one child. For all the joking men do in their world about the more unruly children coming from Below, and Our Father who is there, it is his influence and stamp on them -- there is nothing more he can offer. It is the Enemy Whose hand fashions their development, Who brings the same sickening Tenderness to their parents' hearts as also radiates from His. To strike a child, is to strike those hearts -- His as well as those of the human creatures. And while we have recovered many a soul to Our Houses over the illnesses of children, and sometimes their deaths, the souls have almost exclusively been those of the parents. The children, we almost always lose to the Enemy in their youth and purity before Him.

Your woman, when she shall become a mother, will no doubt look to the Enemy for their safety. Should she marry the Solicitor's son -- and I think we had better plan on that exact event -- he will lift up all his children and wife to Him also, as will his parents and sister. And as he does, so may she. Among their parents, grandparents, and aunt, I must almost forfeit any hope of bringing your woman's children to Our Father Below -- except that He himself showed me the years to come. When those children get to be the age their mother is now, Our Father shall have played the fool, and set into motion what the Enemy's Book calls "Perilous Times." Oh, do not worry -- we shall reap many souls with the legitimising and exaltation of many such behaviours of the sort wherein you had your woman engaging before your blunder. Our battle cries are set already -- "If It Feels Good, Do It" and "Everyone Else Is, So Why Can I Not?" But I call him a fool, because these Perilous Times shall come to a crashing end in precipitating the Enemy's return, as He will do to make an end of us and our work. As that day is not yet here, we may still endeavour to turn one small angle of a step into a fully formed path to us -- so take heart, my daughter.

While you are not excused from what you still must do in reclaiming your woman's life, you may -- not "will," only "may" -- redeem yourself somewhat in ruining, if not claiming outright, the lives and souls of her children. Remember always, though: One failure is enough in the sight of Hell to negate thousands of successes. And do not think that the failure of seeing a patient side with the Enemy is a battle from whose loss there is an easy recovery. From the loss of that battle, many of us have lost the wars for our patients' souls.

At present, it is only your sight you have lost. You have not lost your woman -- nor, I trust, the sense of That Which Is Good For You. To that end, when your sight returns, call out to me at once; next morning, I shall set out for your house. If you possess that Sense, wait for me on your front porch. Front doors are for walking through when opened -- not for needing to be knocked upon.

Never mind what souls you have failed to bring into your larder. Food is not the current issue. We shall sit down at your table and begin immediately to hope for, and to plan, the successes by which I may remain

Your affectionate mother,  
Slumtrimpet 


End file.
